Goldman's Observations2015-01-27T20:14:43Zhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/feed/atomWordPressEric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=18482015-01-27T20:14:43Z2015-01-27T17:47:00ZI’ll be on sabbatical for the entire academic year 2015-16. I’m excited because it comes at a crucial time for me both personally and professionally. I’ll teach my last class at the end of April and then teach again starting August 2016.

I plan to be in my office most days during my sabbatical. It’s too hard to work at home! While I’ll be on campus pretty much as usual, I will be making some changes to my normal schedule:

* I won’t teach. This will be the first time in 20 years that I’ll not be teaching Internet Law! However, I intend to update my Internet Law reader in Summer 2015.

* I will be taking a hiatus from all of my university committee/service work. I’ve already handed off my role as Building Committee chair. I will be stepping out of my role of Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute; I expect Brian Love will continue as director during my sabbatical. I haven’t discussed with the deans if I’ll resume the HTLI co-director role in 2016. During my sabbatical, I will also be handing off my supervision of the Privacy Law Certificate to a person TBD.

* I will be accepting speaking engagements even more selectively. I have a few trips planned before June 30. After that, I’ll probably take only 2-3 business trips over the subsequent 12 months. If you’d like to pitch me on a speaking gig or conference, by all means, please ask me! But please don’t be upset if I say no.

* I don’t expect my blogging to change. As I’ve been doing for the past year, I anticipate about 2 posts/month at Forbes, 4-6 posts/month at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog and once every couple of months here.

* I’ll also continue with my already-reduced slate of external boards, such as the Public Participation Project. However, I don’t anticipate taking on any new ones during the year.

So what will I do with my newly freed time? Obviously, my top priority is to be with my wife and family. Being a lung cancer caretaker has a fair amount of duties and time commitments, not all of which I anticipated. The sabbatical will make my schedule more flexible, so I can leave work early or take personal trips without any professional conflicts.

Professionally, here are some of the things I hope to complete by the end of my sabbatical:

* my main new sabbatical project will be on copyright law as a privacy-protection law (I plan to explain why that’s a bad idea). This is an extension of the Garcia v. Google brief I wrote with Venkat, as well as a continuation of the work I did with Jason Schultz on DoctoredReviews.com. I had hoped to present this project at WIPIP but a conflicting caretaker duty arose and I had to drop off the speaker roster. I still plan to present it at the Internet Law WIP at SCU in March.

* my long-standing vaporware paper on Section 230 and consumer reviews. This is the paper I presented at the Section 230 15 year anniversary conference…in, uh, 2011.

* two complementary short papers on keyword advertising. The first, a paper on competitive keyword advertising by lawyers, is nearly done, and I’ll be circulating it in February. The second, which I hope to finish this semester, will declare the end of keyword advertising legal battles.

* a short paper on self-publishing an electronic casebook, which I’m co-authoring with Rebecca Tushnet. We have already submitted our draft to the journal.

* a short paper on online price discrimination. This is based on a presentation I made back in 2013. I plan to present this paper at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at Berkeley in June.

* a short paper on online contracts, following up on my AALS presentation earlier this month.

]]>2Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=18532015-01-22T15:15:13Z2015-01-22T15:15:13ZMy wife was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in January 2014. Obviously, this has been a devastating development for her, but it’s had pretty significant implications for me too. In this post, I’ll explain what my wife’s lung cancer has done to my career.

I’m a tenured law professor. There are many ways for academics to measure their activities, none of them ideal. Two metrics I’ve meticulously tracked are press quotes and public talks given. (Collecting this information helps when I explain my year’s accomplishments to my dean). I’ll show you how those stats have changed since my wife’s diagnosis.

Press Quotes

Here are the number of press quotes I’ve made over the last dozen years:

As you can see, I was consistently giving well over 200 interviews since 2010, but I slid to 150 in 2014. Another way of reading the data is that lung cancer set my media visibility back 6 years.

I can think of at least two explanations for this drop. First, I turned down more media calls than I used to (or didn’t respond quickly enough) because I was too busy with caretaker duties. Second, because I did fewer external-facing activities (as discussed below), reporters were less exposed to my work and therefore didn’t think to call me as often.

Public Talks

The drop in my public talks is even more dramatic:

I had been giving over 30 talks a year for the past few years. In 2014, I gave 9. Stated another way, lung cancer dialed back my speaking activity a dozen years.

The explanation for this is quite clear. I withdrew from numerous speaking commitments immediately upon my wife’s diagnosis and turned down all new talk requests in 2014 that required travel. [A related indicator of how much I reduced my travel: I flew 75,000 miles on United Airlines in 2013 and earned Platinum status; in 2014, I flew 15,000 miles and earned no status]. My public talks also dried up because many of my professional colleagues knew about my wife’s lung cancer (I blogged about it widely). Trying to respect my time, they simply didn’t ask me to speak even if they would have wanted me to come.

Other Impacts

I significantly scaled back my administrative duties as Director of the High Tech Law Institute. I also ended my involvement in most committees and advisory boards and have added virtually no new ones since my wife’s diagnosis. As a result, many lines in my CV end with “-2014.”

I also reduced my blogging. I don’t have precise counts of how many blog posts I do per year, but I produced fewer blog posts in 2014 than 2013. The drop is especially notable at my Forbes blog, where I had contracted to make 5 posts per month. After my wife’s diagnosis, we mutually agreed to remove that minimum, and the 2014 number dropped to about 2 per month.

Producing scholarly works is another key output for academics. 2014 was a train wreck for my scholarly writing. However, as I cleaned up all of my other obligations, it’s actually created more time for my scholarly work. I anticipate I’ll complete several publications in 2015, a rate well above my output for the past several years.

Conclusion

I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining. In some cases, I probably needed to prune and reshuffle my professional commitments irrespective of my wife’s health. Plus, I intentionally prioritized my domestic obligations over my work obligations for very good reasons. And as unfortunate as my situation is, it’s nothing compared to my wife’s situation.

Still, I previously talked about how a lung cancer diagnosis ripples widely through a community, and this post provides more supporting evidence. Even though I’m in good health, lung cancer has hit my career hard. This is why I think lung cancer research is so crucial. It’s not just about helping people with lung cancer, it’s about preventing lung cancer from ripping open big holes in our society.

]]>1Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=18412014-11-20T00:20:20Z2014-11-19T16:56:57ZEarlier this year, my never-smoking 41-year-old wife was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. As you can imagine, this diagnosis turned our world upside down. Here are five key steps I took shortly after my wife’s diagnosis:

1) Put the Kids First. Previously, my wife and I had a stereotypical division of labor: I was the revenue generator, she was the childcare provider. With my wife’s diagnosis, she could no longer provide day-to-day childcare, so I immediately took over all of the day-to-day childcare, from making lunches to picking the kids up after school. I wanted to preserve a sense of normalcy in my kids’ lives in light of the huge emotional impact they’ve felt.

A few weeks later, after feeling overwhelmed trying to manage four people’s lives, I put in place a new allowance program that codified many of the kids’ daily responsibilities (from feeding the cat to putting on sunscreen) and rewarded them for handling those tasks themselves. This has had the side benefit of helping the kids improve their independence.

2) Declutttered the Kids’ Schedules. The kids had at least one out-of-school commitment each day of the week. Each commitment made sense individually, but collectively these commitments meant the kids had little free time. I dropped a number of the kids’ commitments principally to simplify my own transportation/childcare logistics, but the change also made the kids’ daily schedule is a little less frenetic and stressful.

3) Decluttered My Schedule. I love my job, and I constantly overbooked my life with professional commitments–not because I had to, but because I enjoyed doing so. Without my wife handling childcare, many of my discretionary professional undertakings became unaffordable luxuries. In the first few days following my wife’s diagnosis, I canceled almost all of my travel, dropped off several advisory boards, reduced or eliminated some of my administrative obligations, and ramped down my blogging. I am effectively doing a mid-career reprioritization. What are the key professional deliverables I must achieve, and how will I find the time to deliver them? For me, it all starts with saying “no” more often to discretionary professional tasks, and my family’s needs provide ample motivation to say no more often.

4) Accepted the Kindness of Others. My wife chose to publicly share her diagnosis. As a result, we’ve been overwhelmed with kind offers to help us. I’ve always had difficulty accepting offers of help, so my initial reaction was to resist them. The truth is that we actually needed the help, and I’ve overcome my initial resistance and gratefully accepted some of these offers. I’ve been blown away by how our communities have rallied to assist us, even though we haven’t always been equal participants in those communities. This experience has taught me a lot about ways we can help out others in their times of need.

5) Organized Our Legal Affairs. My wife and I were both lawyers, yet we had never done any basic estate or healthcare planning. As relatively young adults in good physical health, organizing our legal affairs has always felt like something we could deal with later. Now, with the prospects of major structural changes to our lives staring us in the face, this required immediate attention.

It took a family emergency for me to take these steps, but looking back at the chaotic state of our lives, I probably needed to take many of these steps anyway. Perhaps this post will give you some impetus to review your own situation and consider if you should revamp your priorities–without waiting for a family crisis to force those choices.

]]>1Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=18332014-10-24T17:59:46Z2014-10-24T16:57:25ZThe U.S. News rankings of law schools casts a long shadow on the legal education industry. Although the “general” rankings get most of the attention, U.S. News also publishes rankings of various specializations–including a ranking of “intellectual property” programs. Anecdotally, over the years a number of Santa Clara Law high tech students have told me that the specialty rankings influenced their decision to come to SCU.

Unfortunately, the specialty rankings are even less credible than the general rankings. The general rankings are generated using a complex and ever-changing multi-factor formula, which creates a veneer of scientific precision even though the data inputs are often garbage and the assumptions underlying the various factors are mostly stupid. Yet, as bad as that is, it’s a model of rigor compared to the specialty rankings.

Let’s take a closer look at the “formula” used for the IP specialty rankings. IP specialty ranking voters are asked to do the following:

Identify up to fifteen (15) schools that have the highest-quality intellectual property courses or programs. In making your choices consider all elements that contribute to a program’s academic excellence, for example, the depth and breadth of the program, faculty research and publication record, etc.

This instruction is followed by 3 pages listing approximately 200 law schools, organized by state and then alphabetically. I also found Step 5 intriguing: “Keep a copy of your completed survey for your own records”…because…? Can a voter demand a recount later?

There are numerous problems with this survey. Let me highlight two:

* There is a semantic ambiguity about what constitutes an “IP” program and how it relates to “technology” law. Several of the top ranked programs in the IP specialty ranking don’t refer to IP in their program name, such as Stanford’s “Program in Law, Science & Technology,” Berkeley’s “Center for Law & Technology” and Santa Clara’s “High Tech Law Institute.” I believe most voters interpret “IP” to include technology law, even though the ballot’s instructions don’t suggest that.

* how should voters define “quality”? The instructions confusingly say voters can consider “courses” or “programs,” even though those considerations might point in different directions. For example, a school might have excellent faculty members but an average curriculum; or a school could have an awesome roster of courses all staffed by adjuncts. The additional “clarifying” language says voters can consider the “depth and breadth of the program” and faculty research/publications, but those are just more factors that also could point in different directions. So what criteria are voters using, exactly?

Of course, I recognize a tendentious parsing of the ballot’s instructions is meaningless. First, I assume every voter relies on his or her own intuitive sense of what makes for a “good” program, without any consideration of the ballot instructions. Second, and more structurally, voters simply cannot have well-informed views about all 200ish schools. This is a common critique of the general U.S. News ballots, but the critique applies with equal force to the specialty programs.

Because most voters won’t have well-informed views about most programs, the ballot probably devolves into a survey of name recognition and very general impressions–in other words, a popularity contest. I’m amazed when anyone pays close attention to small movements in such an imprecise measure, but perhaps seeing the ballot in all its glory might help discourage such overreliance in the future.

One final point: a few years ago, I was told that U.S. News sent out about 120 ballots for the IP specialty ranking (selected from the ~700 members of the AALS IP Section, even though many section members are only peripherally interested in IP) and had about a 50% return rate. If that’s true, the ranking is based on a total of about 60 votes–in other words, a small dataset that is probably inadequate to produce statistical reliability, and where just a few votes here or there probably can move a school several places up or down in the rankings.

]]>0Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=18202014-07-23T16:51:21Z2014-07-23T16:27:52ZBeing diagnosed with cancer terrifies all of us. In the best case, a cancer diagnosis involves painful or sickening treatments. In the worst case, a cancer diagnosis is an imminent death sentence. Either way, a cancer diagnosis instantly changes the victim’s life.

That’s usually true for family members residing with a cancer victim as well. Inevitably, they take on additional caregiver duties; and they too suffer the emotional toll associated with watching someone they love fighting for their lives. One person has cancer, but the whole family bears cancer’s burden.

When the doctor said my wife had lung cancer, I knew her life, and my life, and the lives of our young kids, would never be the same. What I didn’t appreciate was how other people’s lives were about to change as well.

Financial Implications

Cancer is an expensive disease. Treatments can cost millions; so much that cancer patients can run into health insurance policies’ lifetime maximum cap. Overall, Americans spend over $100 billion a year treating cancer. But cancer’s financial costs go well beyond healthcare costs.

In response to my wife’s diagnosis, my mom is moving from her Sacramento suburb (2.5 hours from us) into our Bay Area peninsula neighborhood. This might sound like the kind of sacrifice we expect moms to make for their children, but this move was hardly routine. It requires relocating my stepfather from his assisted living home, relocating her publishing business, and closing four real estate transactions (selling 2 residential properties and her office building plus buying a new residence). All told, my mom’s move implicates hundreds of thousands of dollars of healthcare expenses for my stepfather, a loss of jobs and revenue from her current community, and millions of dollars of real estate transactions. Who would have thought my wife’s lungs had such financial implications?

With such enormous economic stakes associated with a single cancer diagnosis, we must continue to invest in research for better detection tools and treatment options. Cancer isn’t just a plague on our family; it’s a drain on our society and our economy.

Implications for My Colleague

Previously, I could work hard building my career because my stay-at-home wife took primary responsibility for raising our children and running our household. Not surprisingly, my professional commitments became untenable when my wife no longer could handle those responsibilities.

I direct my law school’s High Tech Law Institute (HTLI), a key academic program at the law school. The directorship is a demanding job, consuming a lot of my time (including weekends and evenings) and attention. In light of my new caregiver responsibilities for my wife plus taking over her childcare and household responsibilities, I no longer could devote the necessary attention to the job.

Finding a successor isn’t easy. Most professors hate administrative duties, and not every professor has the skillset or personality to succeed in the job.

Fortunately, my colleague Brian Love, a patent scholar we hired in 2012, has the skills and personality to handle the job and didn’t categorically reject the idea of taking on additional administrative duties.

Unfortunately, Brian is untenured, and the director’s role can make it harder to get tenure. First, the administrative duties can be a major distraction from the other tasks required to get tenure. At minimum, Brian will have to work hard to satisfy the director’s duties and complete the tenure requirements. Second, an administrative director often makes unpopular and occasionally risky decisions—all of which could be cited against the tenure candidate come tenure-time. Brian, despite all of these downsides, graciously agreed to co-direct the HTLI with me nonetheless.

Thus, my wife’s lung cancer required me to change my professional duties, which led to my colleague making a risky and time-consuming professional move. Furthermore, when Brian attends evening and weekend events that require the director’s attendance, his wife likely will bear more childcare responsibilities for their young child.

In other words, my wife’s lungs directly affects the life of my colleague’s spouse, four social network “hops” away from her.

Cancer Destroys Communities, But It Also Builds Them

Hundreds of people have been affected, directly or indirectly, by my wife’s diagnosis. But amidst of all of this disruption, we have seen amazing generosity from expected and unexpected sources. For example, we joined a synagogue a couple months before the diagnosis, and we had just started meeting other members. When members learned about my wife’s cancer, we were inundated with offers of support: dinners, playdates, childcare, rides and so much more. It was incredible to feel so much love from a group of people we hardly knew. It’s shown us what it really means for a community to care about its members. It took a tragedy to learn that lesson, but it would have been a tragedy if we’d never learned it.

The 6th Annual Your Next Step is the Cure San Francisco, CA 5K, by the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, is another fundraiser in the genre, but with a big difference. For the first time, Lisa is organizing her own Team Lisa, and we anticipate the entire Goldman family (Lisa, me and the kids) will be there to participate. We have benefited substantially from the help of the Addario Foundation, and we are happy to support their work.

The event is September 21, 2014, at Lake Merced in San Francisco. They will have both a run and a walk. The Goldman family will be doing the walk. If you are able to join Team Lisa, pre-registration is $30. If you can’t join us in person but still want to donate, there is a donations page.

I’m excited about enjoying another beautiful day in California as our family and friends walk together to support Lisa. We hope to see you on September 21!

]]>0Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=17842014-06-02T19:30:58Z2014-06-02T18:53:01ZWe recently announced that Brian Love is joining me as co-director of the High Tech Law Institute. This is a good news/bad news announcement. Brian is a terrific talent, and I’m thrilled to work with him. However, given that he’s still pre-tenure, Brian’s new role is a bit early. The timing is driven by my wife’s lung cancer, which has limited my ability to handle the director job. Brian is stepping up at our time of need, but I think this move would have made more sense a few years from now, not today.

Although I plan to remain integrally involved with the High Tech Law Institute as a co-director, this transition has prompted me to reflect on my activities as a director since I took the role in July 2006. Here are some of my highlights from the past 8 years:

New Institutions

Some of the programs we’ve added:

* Entrepreneurs’ Law Clinic. This clinic filled an obvious and long-standing gap in our high tech curricular offerings. It’s also been a foundational piece of efforts to tie together the cross-university programs for entrepreneurs.

* Privacy Law Certificate. Privacy law is a growth industry, and Santa Clara Law plans to stock the privacy community with well-qualified candidates. This certificate is substantially more rigorous than typical law school certificates, and I believe its competency-based approach and rigorous requirements represents the wave of the future for law school certificates.

* HTLI Endowment. This is an internal matter but one of my most important accomplishments. Since I arrived, I have been focused on creating a substantial endowment to fund the HTLI’s operations–a lengthy process that is finally wrapping up successfully. Even in the law school market downturn, this endowed money should allow us to maintain our services.

Other Accomplishments

* Curricular reform/certificate revisions. In 2010, we made two major changes to the high tech curriculum. First, the IP Survey course became the gateway course to the high tech curriculum, rather than having students start with the standalone doctrinal courses. Second, we updated the requirements to obtain the high tech law certificate for the modern era. Both changes have been quite successful. A majority of Santa Clara Law students now take the IP Survey course, and the number of certificate earners more than doubled after the change.

* The team. I can’t claim a lot of credit for hiring either Colleen Chien or Brian Love, but both have been major additions to our program. I did chair the search committee that hired Laura Norris, and she has delivered everything we’d hoped for and more. The HTLI has two of the best professionals in the business in Joy Peacock and Dorice Kunis, and I’m proud to work with both.

* New degree programs. We added a JD/MSIS, one of the few such offerings in the nation, and we recently established a joint JD/IP LLM that ambitious students can complete in 3 calendar years.

Noteworthy Events

I didn’t fully appreciate how much the director job would involve event planning. We organize or co-sponsor between a dozen and 20 events per year, so the cumulative tally over the past 8 years is “too many events to count.” Some event highlights:

* Bay Area Blawgers. Back before blogging became corporatized, we organized a series of successful face-to-face get-togethers for the early legal bloggers in the Bay Area.

* State of the Net West. Working with Tim Lordan and the advisory committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, we had a string of events where members of Congress and other DC insiders engaged a Silicon Valley audience. Series speakers included Reps. Blackburn, Boucher, Chaffetz, Eshoo, Goodlatte, Honda and Lofgren; White House CTO Aneesh Chopra; and FTC Commissioner Julie Brill.

* Federal Circuit hearing. In 2008, we had a 3 judge panel of the Federal Circuit hear oral arguments in 3 cases on campus.

* Passionate Patents. We had a performance of an opera about patent prosecution. Yes, really.

* Academic conferences.

– Trademark Dilution Symposium. When 100 people showed up for a specialized topic like this, I began to appreciate how our audience liked geeky topics. Symposium issue.
– Carterphone and Open Access in the Digital Era. Celebrating the 40 year anniversary of the Carterphone decision was a terrific and timely conference concept (unfortunately, this one didn’t gel as well as I’d hoped).
– 100 Year anniversary of 1909 Copyright Act. Our most popular conference to date (over 250 RSVPs) on one of our most highly specialized topics (a law that had been dying for 35 years). Because we had more RSVPs than seats, we literally had people calling in favors trying to get in the door. Symposium issue (such as that it was).
– Exhaustion and First Sale in IP. Great topic, but we were slightly ahead of the curve with it. Symposium issue.
– Closed-door patent scholars workshop. Check out the roster of presenters: T.J. Chiang, Colleen Chien, Dennis Crouch, Kevin Collins, Jeanne Fromer, Peter Lee, Michael Risch and David Schwartz; with commentary from John Duffy, Jeff Lefstin, Ted Sichelman, Chester Chuang and others.
– 15 year anniversary of 47 USC 230. Perhaps my favorite event of this group. The energy at this conference was incredible. I still hear people talking about this one.
– Patent Defense 2.0. When it comes to patent litigation, Silicon Valley is primarily a defense-oriented community, and it was fascinating to watch that community come together at this event.
– Solutions to the Software Patent Problem. This conference was unusual because we didn’t try to balance the panels. Instead, we started with the premise that software patents were a problem and then asked two dozen bright thinkers how they’d fix the problem. We complemented this conference with a robust online Wired.com symposium describing many of the solutions for a lay audience. The news that Michelle Lee was hired as head of the USPTO Silicon Valley office broke at this conference.
– 15 year anniversary of DMCA. This was a great venue for the Silicon Valley Internet community to celebrate and commiserate about a law we love to hate.
– WIPIP. This conference came at an exceptionally difficult time for me as we got my wife’s diagnosis just a month before the conference. Still, the event was filled with high points from beginning to end, starting with the pre-conference venture capital pitch event and continuing through the closing karaoke night where several dozen IP professors joined in a group singalong of Aqua’s Barbie Girl.

Hallmark features of our events

We take our events seriously, and over the years we’ve developed a few signature traits:

- Schwag. We love schwag! For us, good conference schwag meets strict design parameters: (1) not too heavy, (2) easy to stuff into carry-on luggage, (3) not breakable, (4) something a person would actually want to keep/use, (5) not too expensive (don’t want to violate government ethics rules), and (6) a little nerdy so as to reinforce our brand message. Mugs? No. Bags? No. Instead, over the years, our stalwart piece-o-schwag has been the highly coveted HTLI slinky. Making the HTLI slinky happen has been one of my best perks of being HTLI director. Other highlights include the SCU straws and the M&Ms with the faces of famous IP personalities.

]]>2Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=17892014-05-10T00:23:06Z2014-05-10T00:23:06Z[This is a cross-post of my first post as a LinkedIn “Influencer.” If you dare, you can read the 140+ comments there, but they are about what you’d expect.]

In January, my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. This was as shocking as it sounds. My wife is a 41 year old never-smoker vegetarian fitness instructor in otherwise excellent health. How could someone like her could get lung cancer?

Like most people, I didn’t know much about lung cancer before it hit home. Here are some of the key points I’ve since learned about lung cancer:

1) Non-smokers get lung cancer. Lots of them. You’ve seen the ads linking smoking and lung cancer. Like you, I assumed that meant only smokers got lung cancer. Instead, lots of non- and never-smoking Americans get lung cancer every year. Over 200,000 Americans are diagnosed with lung cancer every year, and about 20% of those never smoked. That means tens of thousands of American never-smokers get lung cancer every year.

2) Young women get lung cancer. Too many of them. My wife’s demographics are not unique among lung cancer patients. For unexplained reasons, lung cancer is striking younger women at increasing rates. Lung cancer among younger women is one of the most disturbing epidemics you haven’t heard of. It’s silently depleting a generation of women at their peaks.

3) Everyone wants a explanation. When I tell people that my wife has lung cancer, people often ask questions seeking some explanation for how it happened. Was it second-hand smoke? Radon? Genetics? Surely there must be a logical reason why my wife got such an unexpected disease. Unfortunately, we have no explanation except that sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Why is lung cancer so lethal? First, lung cancer is often detected late. The most common symptom, a persistent cough, is easily overlooked or misdiagnosed. Second, lung cancer metastasizes easily, so it often turns into an even-harder-to-treat cancer like brain cancer. Third, advanced lung cancer is difficult or impossible to eradicate. Even if a patient with advanced lung cancer gets back a clean CT or PET scan, the lungs likely still contain cancer fragments too small to see. Fourth, lung cancer mutates a lot. The mutations mean a treatment will lose its effectiveness (often within a year or less), and the patient must then try a different treatment. At some point, there are no other treatment options to try.

5) Cancer management isn’t a “cure.” Various chemotherapies and targeted gene therapies can create windows of time where a lung cancer patient can live something resembling a normal life. To outsiders, this may look like the patient is “cured.” Instead, it’s just that the current drug treatment has brought a temporary normalcy–a calm period that will be eventually trumped by unpreventable mutations or metastizations.

BONUS: One more thing I’ve learned: The world is filled with incredibly kind people. Since we’ve announced my wife’s diagnosis, we have been overwhelmed by the generosity of others. Each day brings a new example of people going out of their way to support us. Gossip and the media often draw our attention to our society’s incivility, but unfortunately we let that overshadow the many acts of kindness by the true heroes who quietly make the world a better place.

]]>0Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=17732014-02-27T20:32:13Z2014-02-27T18:34:58ZIn response to my post about Lisa’s lung cancer, we have received hundreds of supportive emails, phone calls, office visits, Facebook comments, retweets and other expressions of support. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to respond to them all. I spent most of Tuesday crying in my office with the door closed from the many ways people took concrete steps to share our story and help us out. It is overwhelming in the most positive sense, a tidal wave of love and the best qualities of the human condition that lifts my spirit and makes me think about how I can be a better person. Among the many amazing responses we got, this email stood out. Someone who I barely know wrote me:
___

“…your post made me think for the first time about my history as a former smoker and how it may have impacted others like your wife, who were smart enough never to start, but who may well have been impacted. I’ve wondered ever I quit 22 years ago, whether my 1.5 ppd history would ultimately bite in the ass but I’ve never even considered its possible impact on innocent third parties. I’m not an inconsiderate or thoughtless person by nature but it wasn’t until I saw your post that I really viewed my own past smoking habit from that perspective. I wish I could apologize on behalf of all smokers who have potentially caused such unintended harm but I find that many current smokers are so heavily addicted that they are in denial of the health effects on those around them – even their unborn children – because to do otherwise would create (in my opinion) an undeniable moral obligation to quit. So I apologize for myself at least…”

___

Here’s how I responded:

“I don’t really know what to say in response to this email except thank you for writing such an insightful and heartfelt email. It means more to us than I can really say. Lisa wanted to get the word out about the risks of lung cancer, and an email like this makes me think she’s succeeded in ways I could have never anticipated. It’s nice of you to apologize, but totally unnecessary. Instead, to the extent you are thinking about the ways you can make choices that make the world a little better, that puts a huge smile on my face, and I owe you a huge thank you.”

___

I have loved all of the posts where you’ve shared our story with your friends and family. Not only have many of you said kind things about Lisa and me, but it means so much when you’ve highlighted some fact you’ve learned and helped explain it to your audience in your words. That raises awareness of the risks of lung cancer better than we ever could. As one example of the responses that have simply overwhelmed me with their kindness and thoughtfulness, see this blog post from long-time friend and colleague Bennet Kelly.

I haven’t been able to thank everyone individually, but I do promise to repay each and every one of these acts of kindness by paying it forward, as much as I can now, and more when my schedule gets more manageable.

*** Note: Tikkun Olam means “repair the world.” In Jewish tradition, we are born into a world with flaws. It is our responsibility to personally undertake to fix some of those flaws.

]]>0Eric Goldmanhttp://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/?p=17642014-02-27T18:13:33Z2014-02-25T19:54:23ZNothing in life prepared me for the moment when the doctor told me my wife Lisa had lung cancer. We knew something was wrong with her; she had a persistent cough for weeks that the doctors couldn’t fix. But lung cancer? Lisa is only 41 years old, in otherwise excellent health, a vegetarian with a healthy diet, and a fitness instructor who taught demanding indoor cycling and pilates courses. And perhaps most importantly, Lisa never smoked or lived with smokers. How could she have lung cancer?

We’ve since learned that tens of thousands of Americans who never smoked, including a troubling number of young and healthy women, get lung cancer every year. Lung cancer kills more Americans than breast, prostate and colon cancers COMBINED, and the death toll for never-smoked lung cancer victims–about 30,000 Americans each year–is a major chunk of overall cancer deaths. However, you probably don’t hear much about these victims. Lung cancer is a ruthless and efficient killer. It’s hard to detect, so it’s typically diagnosed at a late stage, and it easily metastasizes, especially to the brain. As a result, lung cancer victims, including those who never smoked, often die before they can share their stories to the world.

This situation is changing. Blogging technology enables lung cancer victims to tell their stories first-hand, and recent improvements in treatment are helping lung cancer victims live a little longer–perhaps long enough to tell their stories.

As part of this broader phenomenon, Lisa has launched a blog, “Every Breath I Take.” Please check it out. Not only will the blog keep you informed about Lisa’s situation, but we hope it will give a voice to the many thousands of Americans dying each year from this silent killer. Emails were a big part of how Lisa and I communicated at the beginning of our relationship, and I fell in love with her in part because of her witty and conversational writing style. I’m glad that many of you will get to see that special side of her.

I understand that a blog post like this will likely engender many sympathetic emails and offers of help. We are grateful for the overwhelming support we’ve received. I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but this outpouring has changed my worldview. It’s easy to be cynical about the human condition, but I’ve now experienced the other side: many people–close family members and virtual strangers–have gone out of their way to show us extraordinary kindness and thoughtfulness. It’s taught me a lot about the value of “paying it forward,” a lesson I hope to use extensively for the rest of my life.

If you are motivated to help out, here are my two requests of ways you can be most helpful:

1) I’d be grateful for your understanding if my email responses are short or curt and for my sporadic blogging. Lisa was the principal childcare provider, and I’ve taken over that responsibility for now. We are still working on longer-term childcare arrangements. Until we resolve that, my time is stretched very thin.

2) Please spread the word about Lisa’s blog and the reality that lung cancer isn’t just a “smoker’s disease.” Until we get past the “blame the victim” narrative, we won’t fully understand the disease and the victims who have it, nor will we make optimal investments in preventing and treating it.